{"id":44602,"date":"2015-12-15T01:57:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-15T01:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44602"},"modified":"2015-12-15T01:57:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-15T01:57:50","slug":"choose-your-own-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44602","title":{"rendered":"Choose Your Own Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Choose Your Own Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times Magazine<\/a>
\n2015-12-14<\/p>\n

Bonnie Tsui<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nA series of portraits from “The Hapa Project” by the artist Kip Fulbeck<\/a>. Kip Fulbeck\/The Hapa Project<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son. Our family story doesn\u2019t seem too complicated: I\u2019m Chinese-American and my husband is white, an American of English-Dutch-Irish descent; we have two children. My 5-year-old knows my parents were born in China<\/a>, and that I speak Cantonese<\/a> sometimes. He has been to Hong Kong<\/a> and Guangzhou<\/a> to visit his gung-gung, my father. But when I asked him the other day if he was Chinese, he said no.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re<\/em> Chinese, but I\u2019m not,\u201d he told me, with certainty. \u201cBut I eat Chinese food.\u201d This gave me pause. How could I tell him that I wasn\u2019t talking about food or cultural heritage or where we were born? (Me, I\u2019m from Queens<\/a>.) I had no basis to describe race to him other than the one I\u2019d taken pains to avoid: how we look and how other people treat us as a result.<\/p>\n

My son probably doesn\u2019t need me to tell him we look different. He\u2019s a whir-in-a-blender mix of my husband and me; he has been called Croatian and Italian. More than once in his life, he will be asked, \u201cWhat are you?\u201d But in that moment when he confidently asserted himself as \u201cnot Chinese,\u201d I felt a selfish urge for him to claim a way of describing himself that included my side of his genetic code. And yet I knew that I had no business telling him what his racial identity was. Today, he might feel white; tomorrow he might feel more Chinese. The next day, more, well, both. Who\u2019s to say but him?<\/p>\n

Racial identity can be fluid. More and more, it will have to be: Multiracial Americans are on the rise, growing at a rate three times as fast as the country\u2019s population as a whole, according to a new Pew Research Center study released in June<\/a>. Nearly half of mixed-race Americans today are younger than 18, and about 7 percent of the U.S. adult population could be considered multiracial, though they might not call themselves that. The need to categorize people into specific race groups will never feel entirely relevant to this population, whose perceptions of who they are can change by the day, depending on the people they\u2019re with…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Choose Your Own Identity The New York Times Magazine 2015-12-14 Bonnie Tsui A series of portraits from “The Hapa Project” by the artist Kip Fulbeck. Kip Fulbeck\/The Hapa Project I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son. Our family story doesn\u2019t seem too complicated: I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,33,8,394,20],"tags":[22266,2640,8894,2327,13109],"class_list":["post-44602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-bonnie-tsui","tag-new-york-times","tag-new-york-times-magazine","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44603,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44602\/revisions\/44603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}